SARK Facebook Special Report

Succulent Wild Facebook: 5 Steps to Building a
Joy-full Community of Followers and Clients
Scott Mills, Ph.D. and SARK
We Were Meant to Create Succulent Wild Businesses
and Facebook can help!
For the last twenty five years, Planet SARK has been ultimately about building
relationships and offering value - an exchange of energy. This is part of a larger
strategy of doing business that we
call - Succulent Wild Business.
It’s what has supported SARK in
writing 17 bestselling books, creating
a multimillion dollar product line and
teaching people around the world.
And it’s the philosophy that we use
to reach millions every week on
Facebook!
We get how tricky all this is to figure
out. For those of you who want to
change the world you need to be
able to reach an audience who is
hungry for what you have to offer.
And most people on Facebook have been looking for a quick and easy solution to
marketing. In essence, they try to buy the hearts of followers without connecting deeply
with their audiences.
By following the principles of Succulent Wild Business, we created a five step process
that we use to reach millions, engage our followers and keep them coming back for
more! We hope this special report will help you to reach your audience in a way that
inspires and excites them to help you share you message!
Some of the results we have achieved
We have to admit that we figured out most of what we discovered by accident. I (Scott)
had taken courses from some of the biggest names in the world of Facebook and yet
whenever I tried what they suggested, it seemed to fall flat.
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This was really frustrating because Facebook ads can be expensive with almost no
results if you don’t know what you’re doing. So we threw out the playbook and decided
to do what we do best - listen deeply to our followers and share what would inspire and
excite them.
And we’ve tried quite a few things in this process. We’ve been surprised by some of the
things that we thought would work great but actually failed. And we’ve been excited
about the things that we tried with uncertainty and discovered people loved.
Here’s a snapshot of the results that we’ve been able to create:
•We added 30,000 followers to our page
in four months while spending almost no
money. Currently we add about 10,000
followers a month with a system that’s
largely on autopilot.
•Our engagement rates are 3 to 5 times
higher than most pages that are close to us
in size.
•Thousands of people have joined our
email list as well as our private Facebook
groups.
•Our reach on average is about 5 million
people per week who have been sharing
with their friends as well as signing up for
email list, joining our webinars and buying
our products.
Part of what surprised us is that almost all of this traffic has been organic - meaning
there are no costs to advertising. And when we look at our friends who are paying
thousands a month for companies to manage their Facebook presence we see that we
have been far outperforming them.
How is Facebook working for you?
We suspect if you are reading this report, Facebook is a tool that you believe could help
you share your message and reach your ideal customers. And you’re either doing okay
with it and would like to know how to do better or you’d like to use it as a tool but you
are totally confused by it.
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Before we introduce you to the five step process we use, we find it helpful to quickly see
how what you are doing is working for you right now. So please take a moment and
ask yourself the following five questions:
1. How many followers do I currently have? Am I consistently adding new
followers every week?
Of course you may have some ups and downs, but you want to see if you are reaching
enough people to really make your efforts worth your while.
A common solution that many people have used is like campaigns. Sometimes these
may be effective, but in general we’ve found organic likes way more effective in the long
run because people tend to be more engaged.
2. Are my followers engaged?
The more engaged your followers are (i.e. they are liking your page, commenting on
your posts and sharing them with others) the more useful Facebook is. Facebook uses
engagement levels to decide how many people they will show your posts to. A
small group of people who like what you are doing can be really effective at getting your
message out to the world.
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We track this with a simple ratio: number of people who are engaged as reported by
Facebook divided by number of people who like our page. You can use this as a simple
way to notice if your engagement is going up or down.
For most people, they actually have a very low level of engagement because they are
posting things just to feel like they are doing something. This actually hurts you in the
long run because posting that doesn’t create engagement lowers your engagement
ratio. Then Facebook limits the number of people who see your posts in their feeds.
This is why choosing the right content for your page is so important.
3. Are you getting a good return on the time you spend on Facebook?
You may be doing very little and getting little in exchange. That’s where most people
start out. But once you get going, you may be doing a lot to get a small return.
Here’s the thing…When you build a relationship it takes time and effort on your part up
front. That means very rarely do consistently good results come from a burst of energy.
You have to invest in building your community.
But if you are doing it strategically, the energy you invest in the beginning can be
recycled again and again. We’ve learned that if we set up our systems wisely the time
we spend has an exponential return on the investment. Ask yourself are your systems
set up to maximize the energy that you are putting into Facebook?
4. Are you getting a good return on the money you are spending on Facebook?
How much money you are investing in Facebook? If you are working with a good team
you can get great results and we love some of the work our friends do in this area.
We’ve also noticed the more organic, unpaid traffic we get the higher our levels of
engagement and sharing.
So simply ask yourself if you are getting what you want in return for your investment.
5. Are you satisfied with where you are?
If you went through these questions and feel great about where you are then you should
probably leave things as is. If it’s not broken, no need to fix it. But if you aren’t satisfied
with your answers to these questions then take a good look at our five steps for 5 Step
Process. You’ll find you can make a big difference pretty quickly.
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Five Step Approach to Building Highly engaged Facebook
Communities
Our five step approach to building massive engagement on Facebook was developed
with trial and error. No one seemed to be teaching the steps quite like we put them
together.
We like to think of this process as a spiral. We go through each step weekly and
continue to expand our reach. Feel free to experiment with your own path.
STEP 1: Discover the Pulse of Your Community
One of the most frustrating things about Facebook is spending time and energy to post
things on your Facebook page and getting no results. We felt that pain right along with
you having tried posting things that other people suggested and not getting the results
that we wanted. And when people don’t like, share or comment on your posts it kills
your engagement levels. When you have low engagement Facebook shares your
posts with even fewer people. So it turns out posting content that doesn’t engage
your community is even worse than posting nothing at all.
We learned that every community has it’s own unique pulse - a kind of psychological
profile that points to what it will respond, what it will share and what it will ignore. And if
you are not on the pulse of your community you will fall flat. We developed a
comprehensive tool to hone into the pulse of the community but you don’t have to have
a Ph.D. in Psychology to get started.
Begin by simply paying attention to how people respond to your posts. It turns out, for
example, that humor falls flat on our page. Our people rarely respond. But what our
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people do love is being inspired. Fairly easy beginning point. So ask yourself these
three questions.
1. What is your community most wanting you to provide in their lives?
They found you for a reason. There was something that spoke to them. And whatever
that was is what they will continue to want to hear more of.
You get to make a choice here. You can either respond to the community that you have
or you can shape the community that you would like to nurture. If you choose to
respond to the community that you have you can watch the numbers and get a good
sense if you are on the pulse of your community.
If you decide that you are going to craft a community, you’ll want to pay attention to the
comments to see if the people you are most interested in are engaging. It’s a little
more time intensive at first but will ultimately get you to your ideal clients better.
2. What most excites your community?
Some communities love tips and tools. Kris Karr is a great example of this. She gets
lots of traction with her wonderful recipes. So what is it that most excites your people.
Inspiration, strategy, resources, humor?
3. What medium does your community respond to best?
Once you know what exciteds your community, you’ll want to ask what medium do they
prefer. What might do best on a page for busy mothers might be totally different than
what people respond to on a page for meditators. One might love videos while the
other one might not. You’ll also want to pay attention to the length that they prefer
whether it’s video or writing. We’ve even noticed that there are certain color palettes
that our folks tend to respond to significantly better.
All this makes up the pulse of your community and when you have a good sense of it,
you’ll begin to see an immediate increase in engagement. Follow us on Facebook
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Step 2: Organize For Greatest Impact
Once you’ve identified the pulse of your community by testing some content, you’ll want
to start to figure out how to best organize your efforts so that ultimately you can
automate and recycle more and more of what you create that works.
There are two main
considerations that we
have when we think about
organizing for Facebook:
when do you post and
how do you deliver.
Timing
We mentioned earlier that
a lot of the information
that has come out about
Facebook doesn’t seem
to work. One of the
biggest reasons for this is
that it ignores the
complexities of
communities. Facebook addresses a potentially global community so when you read
the best times to post you are often looking at times in one specific time zone. On top
of it, those times are often specific to a particular type of follower.
In our experience, entrepreneurs are looking at Facebook at very different times than
parents. And, as our audience is global with spikes in the U.S., Australia and England
we’ve had to figure out the best times to post so that we continue to build our
international audience. You’ll want to address the same considerations when you are
planning your Facebook strategy.
Delivery
The second major question is how you deliver. If you are going to be posting multiple
times a day you most certainly want to pick a software that can work with you and the
other social media platforms that you are choosing to engage. There are a number of
good choices including using Facebook’s own scheduling system to post things that
only occur once. Follow us on Facebook
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Step 3: Build a Library
You’re putting a lot of effort into creating posts that are engaging. It’s not enough to
share other people’s things - although this is a great strategy at times. You’ll want to
build out a library of your own content.
We’ve found that people love our original content because they’ve never seen it before.
If we are on the pulse of the community and we create a quote, a video, a resource or a
blog that really speaks to our followers, they will share widely. Many of our memes
have been shared thousands of times and with each share we usually gain new
followers.
There are few things that we’ve learned about creating our own memes.
1. Make them original. You can play here and try new things to discover what works
best for your community.
2. Use art that conveys
an emotion. The image
that you choose for your
memes should speak to
your followers before they
get to the words.
3. Be careful about
copyrighted material.
You could spend a ton of
money to get the same old
stock photos that show up
all over the place. We’ve
preferred to get our
material from copyright
free sources like
pixabay.com or
morguefile.org that are
constantly being refreshed.
There are plenty of services that you can have create these for you. You will want to
make sure that you help whoever is creating these for you understand the pulse of your
community or you’ll end up having memes made that don’t really work for your
community. Follow us on Facebook
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Step 4: Create
Feedback Loop
The only way to tell if what you’re
creating is working is to create
some feedback loops. It’s too
simple to try to do these one at a
time. You actually want to look at
them in batches to really discover
the themes.
We use a few measures to decide
if something is really working.
-Likes - This is the simplest way to
tell if people are engaging. A post
with a lot of likes obviously beats
out a post with only a few likes.
-Comments - Posts with
comments show a higher level of
engagement. It took time to write
the comment and even when
someone doesn’t like something we
do it can often massively boost our engagement as the comment wars arise.
- Shares - This is our primary feedback loop even beyond likes and comments. This is
most important for us because shares introduce our work to people who have not
seen it before rather than just folks who know us.
You don’t need to do this everyday but you should be looking at these at least once a
week to get a sense of what you want to adjust. This is the point in the process where
you adjust anything from the times you are posting, the medium, or even try different
color schemes.
At the beginning you’re just trying things out like throwing spaghetti at a wall. You can
see what sticks and go from there. As you continue to develop your Facebook
community you’ll get more and more refined in your process.
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Step 5: Ads and Collaborative Shares
We end at the place where most people start on Facebook - with advertisements.
We’ve found that once someone has already liked us on Facebook then advertising to
them is far more effective. It’s a gentle reminder rather than a harsh interruption.
We’ve also been developing some new strategies around collaboration with our peers
on Facebook that have some of our posts reaching 2 million people all by themselves.
So this is the place that, now you’ve delivered lots of value to your community, you can
make another invitation.
Invitation to Learn more
We hope this report has given you a good starting point for what you can do on
Facebook. It’s an incredible tool for building community that has become a cornerstone
of our outreach efforts.
If you would like to dive even deeper into the strategies we’ve shared here, you can join
Dr. Scott for a live webinar where he teaches even more of the strategies that we’ve
discussed here and answers your questions.
Sign up for a
special webinar
to learn more
and answer all
your questions
here.
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